apt and proxy problems

[Bake Timmons]

Rather than register in Launchpad, I thought I would report here about
a kind of bug that seems to bite apt from time to time.

apt-get (0.7.9ubuntu17) does not play well with at least one web proxy
-- wwwoffle (several recent versions).  What happens is that apt-get
keeps downloading data (particularly Package files) but unreliably
completing the download and often trying again and again in a
sometimes very large time frame, like a couple of hours.  One morning,
on an automatic cron apt update I suppose, it looked like over 1GB of
wasted downloads had resulted from this bug!

A workaround is to set the following option in wwwoffle.conf:

reply-chunked-data = no

In any case, apt-get has apparently suffered from bugs involving
chunked encoding over recent years.  Another workaround that works for
me so far is to just use another proxy like polipo that just happens
to not be affected by this bug.

Does anyone know more about this bug?  Thanks.